Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Noodling around and trying to learn more about Qimage (ver 2010.209) I noticed this - an asterisk "*" in the Enabled Collum which is supposed to mean "invalid ICC profile".

Why is Qimage dispalying this?  The profile is valid as far as Photoshop is concerned, or at least I thought so up to now

Do I need to Enable the profile for Qimage? How?

cvt

What profile in which box?
There are three places.
Send screen snap, please.

Fred

Hi,
Not sure where you are seeing this, please describe the menu path or give us a screen shot. Is it an ICC profile?
Menu: Edit/Preferences/Color Management(ICC)
See screen shot attached. You can see there where Monitor & Printer profiles are set.
The Job Properties panel, bottom right of the main screen shows the settings too and clicking the blue dots enable selecting different profiles.
It's a good idea, once set up with a paper, printer, etc. to save as a printer set-up for  quick re-call.
Terry

Attached is ICC screen from Edit -> Preferences -> Color Management

cvt

Hi Chuck,
I can't see from the screen shot what the profile is but it is probably not an "INPUT" profile, ie. camera, scanner, with the cursor in the input section, click F1 to see the Help on this.
It's only if there's no other data like an embedded profile or an Exif tag that requires data entry in INPUT. See my screen shot above, I never use the feature. I get a default of sRGB if there's no tag or embedded profile but I'm usually aware of what an image profile should be.
An embedded profile is the ideal ("correct") way to communicate an image colour space. Your conversion/editing software, PS I assume, can embed profiles so you should not have a problem.
When you hover your mouse over a thumb, the Exif bar at the bottom of the main screen tells you what Qimage is seeing as the image profile, right hand end of information.
Right mouse button over a thumb and choose Display Image Info' tells you if there is an embedded profiles or not.
You can override an image profile by using a filter too.
Hope that helps.
Terry

So that entry in the Color Management window is for the "input" (camera or scanner ICC profile)? Interesting. 
That certainly does not leap out at me.

Thanks
cvt

Input is input, it could be a camera profile, camera Exif ID and associated jpeg profile, scanner profile, sRGB or Adobe RGB etc.
It makes it clear above that section that lines are inserted for cases when no embedded profile is found. Any decent editing software will do this anyway, so no problem.
Qimage does not "assign" a working space like an editing program, it reads what the colour space of an image is, or you tell it what to use when there is no data.
Q follows the normal colour management process for viewing & printing; Input > Convert for monitor or with monitor profile, or, Input > convert with Printer profile.
The layout of the CM dialogue reflects that.
I realise I've been using Q for a long time and these things are second nature to me but I hope you'll soon into the Q way of thinking  ;)
Perhaps Fred will add to this and put a different angle on it to help you.
Terry

You can test profiles with these free tools from the ICC:
http://www.color.org/resource2.xalter

ICC Profile Inspector - opens an ICC profiles and makes the contents readable
Profile Dump - an example utility built using SampleICC that reads profiles and checks them for conformance

Most report some error but that is usually minor.

The version number is also important. In general for Windows as advised by my calibrator instructions monitor and input devices should be version 2 and print profiles should be version 4. Q did not have problems with version 4 but my editing software did.

In one case I did get the invalid profile warning on a printer profile I had used before. I recreated it with the same software and it was OK. So something corrupted the file.

Lot's of good information on the ICC site about profiles.